15 months after the first public release, Rails has arrived at the big 1.0. What a journey! We’ve gone through thousands of revisions, tickets, and patches from hundreds of contributors to get here. I’m incredibly proud at the core committer team, the community, and the ecosystem we’ve raised around this framework.

Rails 1.0 is mostly about making all the work we’ve been doing solid. So it’s not packed with new features over 0.14.x, but has spit, polish, and long nights applied to iron out kinks and ensure that it works mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people. Yes, we still have pending tickets, but we will always have pending tickets. If I had accepted that fact back in February, we would probably have been at 2.0 now ;).

Alongside 1.0, we’ve also been working on a new web site, which premieres today as well. It’s a 37signals-powered redesign that streamlines and decrufts us into a much cleaner profile that hopefully will make it even easier for people to get excited and try out Ruby on Rails. It’s online at www.rubyonrails.org and includes two brand new screencasts.

So this is a major milestone for Rails, but we’ve not even begun to think about slowing down. Rails 1.1 is already pretty far along in development and will see some of the biggest upgrades of any Rails release. Hopefully some time in February. But in the mean time, enjoy one oh!

To install Rails 1.0:

gem install rails —include-dependencies

To learn about upgrading a Rails application not already running 0.14.x: Upgrade to 1.0

The only thing you need to do to upgrade from 0.14.x is update your Javascripts using “rake update_javascripts”. You’ll be rocking along with Scriptaculous 1.5 and Prototype 1.4.